John W. Sharp on eHealth and Health IT

This is my other presentation at HIMSS 2010. One of the real values of EMRs is the secondary use of the data for research. While respecting patient privacy, this kind of research can be rapidly developed from EMR data. We recommend the following steps:

define the cohort of patients you want to study/monitor

define the data elements you want included

review and verify data elements with subject matter experts

set up a regular interval to extract the data

generate some test queries to verify the process

monitor to use of the data (ongoing governance)

Our initial experience with a Chronic Kidney Disease registry has been a success. We recommend that research issues be considered in any purchase and implementation of an EMR.